Day 178: Kool & the Gang – Emergency
Today’s album comes highly recommended, with the recommending tastemaker calling it “soooooo good”. I’ve already covered one Kool & the Gang album, having ranked Ladies Night a 7, but I added that “I’m sure I can find something I like more in the Kool & the Gang discography.” Let’s see if we can make that happen with Emergency.
Album cover courtesy of De-Lite Records
I think I can skip the background info about the band today as I already covered it on day 111, so let’s get straight into the album: Emergency was released in 1984 as the group’s sixteenth album, and it became their biggest seller. It had four hits, "Emergency", "Fresh", "Cherish" and "Misled", and it sold over two million copies.
Emergency follows Kool & the Gang’s usual blueprint of making a high-vibrational feel-good record with practically no skips. Are they reinventing the wheel? No, but they’re doing their own instantly recognisable thing. The more rock-inspired “Emergency” is probably my favourite of the bunch, but there are a few ballads in there that I didn’t expect to like as much as I did, and the funky ode to God, “You Are the One”, is also one of the better tunes.
You never really think about the amount of bangers made by Kool & the Gang, but they’ve had a total of 12 top 10 hits: “Jungle Boogie,” “Hollywood Swinging,” “Ladies’ Night,” “Too Hot,” “Celebration,” “Get Down On It,” “Joanna,” “Fresh,” “Misled,” “Cherish,” “Victory” and “Stone Love”. And they’re still going! They’ve been active since 1964 and their most recent album came out three years ago. And they’re still touring, too, they opened on a tour with Van Halen in 2012-2013, which is a rogue combo but if I had a time machine you best believe I’d go – not among the first things I’d do, but possibly at some stage once I’ve done the more pressing stuff.
Is there a band more dependable than Kool & the Gang? Surely they have to be up there on the list of most consistent makers of stuff. I’ve never heard a single song by them and gone, “oh no, not these guys again”. And they’ve crossed over from genre to genre, going from jazz to R&B to funk to pop to disco, always managing to have that fresh, sunny sound that they’re known for.
I’ve come to the conclusion that I have a newfangled appreciation for Kool & the Gang. They’re a solid, dependable, reliable band that can do more than we give them credit for, and it’s never not fun listening to them. The only time I felt a little wobble was when the song “Bad Woman” opens with “Bad woman, mad woman / Satisfy the man”, which sounds like an very non-PC recommendation. But that gets cleared up in the chorus:
Bad woman, mad woman
Sleepless nights I call your name
You're the only one
To ever satisfy the man
Phew! No weird misogynist songs from Kool and/or the Gang, no sir. I like these guys, they never let you down. Emergency is an 8/10.